Nursing job cuts 'breach promise': SA Opposition

The Opposition says the South Australian Government has broken a promise to protect front-line health jobs.

SA Health confirmed to a parliamentary budget and finance committee on Monday that 200 nursing jobs were to go out of more than 600 full-time jobs cuts.

Opposition health spokesman Rob Lucas blamed economic mismanagement by the Government in such areas as overspending on new health computer systems.

He said front-line care should be the last area for any budget cuts in health.

"Clearly your priorities are, if you have a choice, is to ensure that you make your cuts to administration and back office areas rather than front-line services. It's really only your last choice where you start having to cut either doctors or nursing positions," he said.

SA Health said quality of care would not be affected by the loss of nursing positions.

Chief executive David Swan said efficiency reviews on the length of hospital stays would result in positions not being needed.

He said no one would lose their job, as staff would be redeployed or lost through natural attrition.

"We still have significantly more nurses than the national average," he said.

"The recommendations from those various reviews [are] that we have opportunities to reduce the amount of time that patients are in hospital in some areas of our services.

"If we achieve that we will have less beds and we will need less staff because the patients won't be there."

Mr Swan said the cost of computer systems was not a factor in decisions on jobs.

"There is no relationship between any IT project and these initiatives that we're speaking about now. No relationship at all," he said.

Nursing Federation secretary Elizabeth Dabars said the union had a binding agreement that nurses could not be forced to care for more patients with fewer staff than now.

She said the union did not necessarily object to efficiency measures.

"In fact we've put forward some really positive solutions to achieve efficiencies and provided that the efficiencies that they're talking about are genuine and in the best interests of the patients, we certainly have no objection," she said.